Tag: the huntsman

Help from Sebastien de Castell

Laura Highcove

I have poured out some new words on The Huntsman, but things are still not coming together the way I would like them to. As such I’ve gone back to the beginning again to smooth what I have and hopefully push forward again.

Going back to the beginning of my story does two positive things for me. One, the beginning is rather solid right now, so it helps me remember I’m not a terrible writer and it lifts my spirits. Two, it allows me to shift the story as a result of new things I have discovery written, including relationships between characters, because, let’s be honest, the thing I enjoy most about writing is the relationships between characters. So whenever they get more nuanced and detailed, it makes me happy and keeps me motivated.

I was listening to a podcast from DIY MFA.com where the author Sebastien de Castell talked about how much more difficult writing a sequel book is. As he pointed out, in the first book you can just create as much as you want, but in the sequel there are already rules, rules you can’t change (especially if the book is already published.) and expectations that have been set.

It just made me realize how true that was, and I stopped beating myself up so much about the expectation that I had that since the first book only took me two years, I should be able to do that for the second. The book is going to take as long as it’s going to take. I may never be one of those authors who pounds out a book a year. And that may change when I have an agent and/or editor helping me out. Right now I can only work with what I have. My goal right now is aimed at having an alpha ready by the end of the year. It’s good to always have a goal, even if you don’t make it. And who knows, tomorrow I might have that idea or write the scene that fixes all the problems I’m having. That’s part of why writing is so much fun.

PS: Sebastien’s Greatcoat books are super amazing, so if you like swashbuckling and snarky narrators, give them a shot.

Making it Fun Again

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

I’m starting to think that two weeks between journal entries might be too long. A lot happens in two weeks, a lot of things can change. I’m not going to make my deadline. I’ve been moving forward pretty steadily, I just seriously misjudged where I was with the Huntsman when I made my goal.

I spent much of last week beating myself up the fact that I’m failing to meet my deadlines and that I’m not working on my story 24/7. But at a certain point I just had to stop and realize I wasn’t having fun anymore. It was a chore and I can’t write like that. I reminded myself that whether or not this story ever gets published isn’t what matters. It’s writing a story that I enjoy and that I want to read over and over, just like The Law of the Prince Charming. I’m still having a little trouble letting go of my attachment to my deadlines, but at least now I’m focusing more on writing something I enjoy. But this is only the second book I’ve worked on this seriously, so I can only be so surprised when I wildly misjudge how long things will take. I’m sure it’s something I will learn with time, just like everything else.

That being said, I went back and smoothed out the beginning of the story and am pushing my way through Wildrose’s arc. It’s been difficult and it’s been fun. My plan now is to push through to the middle of the book in the next two weeks, both Wildrose and Tabitha’s arcs. The only way to go is forward after all.

However, it’s also time for me to admit that I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Now I’m obviously still going to write, I’m just not throwing my hat in the NaNoWriMo ring. I love NaNoWriMo and I have learned so much about myself as a writer from it, but I keep reaching the point where I feel like NaNoWriMo is getting in the way rather than helping. This year, in particular, for several reasons. I’ll be going into more detail about those reasons in this month’s newsletter, so go ahead and sign up so you can stay in the loop.

See you in two weeks.

Wildrose’s Arc (Aug 28 – Sept 10, 2017)

Laura Highcove

I’ve been pushing through Gabir’s character arc and it’s going well, if not more slowly than I was expecting. I misjudged my timeline for a couple reasons. One being the downtime I needed to get reorganized after being away from home for two weeks, another in that the last time I made estimations on how much time revisions like this would take, the story was far closer to completion than this one.

Gabir’s arc is done and now I’ve moved on to Wildrose’s about a week late. I am really enjoying delving more deeply into Wildrose, since I hadn’t done any scenes from his pov yet. When I started this book I thought I was only going to use pov from Tabitha and Gabir, but I realized that Wildrose was doing a lot of stuff in the background and not confiding any of it to anyone, which means for the reader to have any idea what’s going on, he would have to have his own pov scenes.

On the other hand, there are many scenes where Tabitha and Rose interact, so as I’m doing Wildrose’s arc, a lot of work is being done on Tabitha’s arc as well. So I hope to have the both of them done by Sept 24th. Which will give me plenty of time to fix up the rest of the story, do a smoothing pass, and be ready to start on the draft 0 for the Wizard (Book 3).

Gabir’s Arc (Aug 14 – 27, 2017)

Laura Highcove

So these past few weeks were rather busy. After Otakon I spent a few days with my husband’s family and I got a good amount of writing done in the mornings. I got my Scrivener outline done and started to fill in the scenes that involved Gabir.

On Thursday the 17th I went up to New York City for Writer’s Digest Conference. Had a lot of great stuff happen there, from the panels, to seeing other DIY MFA people, and the Pitch Slam (speed dating for authors and agents). I’m working on a post for what happened at the conference that will be posted later. I am going to be putting the details of the pitch slam in my newsletter so sign up for that if you haven’t already if you’re interested in hearing more about it.

I had a great time overall, but I neglected to remember/predict how hard I would crash on getting home. After being gone from home for almost two weeks I needed decompression/organization time. I barely worked on any writing until Friday which means I didn’t finish Gabir’s arc. On the other hand, my house looks beautiful. 😀

The plan is to finish up Gabir’s arc and then move on to Wildrose’s arc.

As a side note: During the drive, my hubby pointed out that my numbers for how much I planned on writing for NaNoWriMo were wrong. I had gone back and forth on how much I was planning to write and when, and I think I just got my numbers crossed. (I have a math minor but that doesn’t mean I’m good at it, just that I know more math exists than most people.) Here are the actual, correct numbers:

26 days (since I’m taking Fridays off) x 2.5k a day = 65k total

Smoothing Pass (Aug 7 – 13, 2017)

Laura Highcove

So I managed to get this done even with Otakon this weekend. I finished creating the summary/loose outline before I left, and this morning (which is technically the 14th, but I’ll count it) I went through and moved the pieces around a bit. Now I’m feeling better about how things are coming together.

This is the reason that I sit down and just do overall organization passes. It’s pretty much like creating an outline, only I don’t think I refer back to my outline as much as writers who outline do. The process of creating the outline helps me fit everything together in my head, and then I only refer to it if I get lost.

This time I plan to try something new and create an outline with the notecards in Scrivener. Not sure how well it will work, but I am going to put together the middle of the story where things are really rough right now as just an outline in order to shoehorn everything in. Shouldn’t take me more than a day. Then I can get to work on Gabir’s arc which, while it is the most important, it is also the most solid right now. So even with Writer’s Digest this weekend, I should be able to get that done.

I think the Wildrose arc will give me the most trouble, but starting in September I’m back to working at the barn only half days and so I will have more time in the afternoon to work on his arc as needed.

Of course with Writer’s Digest this weekend, I may attend a panel that completely changes my writing life and give me some sort of amazing insight, but barring that I think my plan is pretty solid.

Still on Track

Laura Highcove

I had a great week writing and then I got sick last Friday, so my productive writing time suffered. I’m glad I don’t get sick very often. I still got a lot of good words written for the beginning of the novel, all coming after the rut I got myself out of two weeks ago. I’m also getting to know Emelia better and better, which is making scenes with her easier. Looks like she might end up being a pov character after all.

The plan is to finish up the beginning (which shouldn’t be too much more) this weekend and then start working through the ending. I have most of the ending written, just not fleshed our or in the correct order. Being a discovery writer is so much fun! But I am ending up with some extra time this coming week so I should be able to get a lot of work done.

In addition, I am currently participating in #wipjoy, which gives prompts to answer about your current WIP. So if you’d like some tantalizing insights into what I’ve been working on, be sure to check out those posts daily on my facebook page.

Getting out of a Rut

Laura Highcove

So my goal for last week was to write 10k more words for The Wizard and to get through the halfway point of The Huntsman.

I did not get 10k new words for the Wizard. I ended up focusing mostly on The Huntsman, which I did get through the halfway point. I did a lot of new writing for the Huntsman, there was one scene that needed to be completely rewritten and a few scenes that I am now adding in. I’m not sure if that’s ended up being near 10k words. When I’m revising words get written and deleted and moved all around so it’s not really as easy as saying ‘Yes, I now have 10k more words’.

Setting a word count goal worked a lot better on The Law of the Prince Charming, which I wrote lineraly. On the Huntsman that is just not working because I jump around so much. So I’ll say half of my goal was not achieved, but the other half was. I got through to the halfway point of the Huntman.

After finishing through the halfway point of Huntsman, I went back to the beginning. The details of the ending are starting to come together more clearly now and I have an idea of how to better tie them into the beginning. But when I tried to change things around in the beginning, I was completely stuck inside this huge info dump that would logically happen, but that was absolutely no fun.

I struggled with it for a few hours before realizing I was stuck in a rut. I had these scenes and I was trying to move them around each other to fit together better and I just couldn’t do it. So I went to my hubby and told him where I was and he was able to offer a few suggestions of completely different ways to go, one of which sounded really good, so now I and rewriting the beginning and so far it’s going much more smoothly.

Goal for the next two weeks: rewrite the beginning so I’m happy with it, then go and rewrite the ending. Once I have those two things smoothed out I can start working on the second half of the book, which is the part I always have the most trouble with.

New Title for The Storyteller

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

For those of you who have been around for a while, you know I have a novel called The Storyteller. I never spend all that much time coming up with titles for my books. They’ve always just been a way for me to label my files and refer to them when I talk to my husband.

The Storyteller is the first novel that I have actually finished and polished to this level, so my mentor suggested keeping my mind open to ideas for a different title. It occurred to me that maybe I should think of a better title. They said on the Writing Excuses Podcast once that when you’re pitching your book to potential readers, you want to be able to grab their interest with the title of the book. Well The Storyteller isn’t really a title that jumps up and grabs attention. That’s why I decided to change the name to The Law of the Prince Charming. Overall, I think it captures the feel of the book as well as perhaps being better at grabbing people’s interest.

So I made a new cover picture for my facebook page. The ‘Sign Up’ button is a link to my Newsletter where you can get the first chapter of The Law of the Prince Charming.

As for my writing these past two weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of back and forth. I finished the rough draft of The Huntsman (still the working title) which means I have my beginning middle and end. I decided that it would be a good idea for me to start working on the third book (working title: The Wizard) instead of going through and polishing it all the way up first. That’s mostly because, as a discovery writer, I am still developing the ideas for these two books. I know mostly where everything is going, but there are a few pieces that I need to tie everything together and I haven’t been able to pull them out of my brain yet.

So I’ve been going back and forth between writing 1500 words a day into The Wizard, and revising my way through The Huntsman. And the story ideas are already starting to tighten up. I even went back and wrote a character (albeit, rather minor) out of The Law of the Prince Charming; giving his part to a different character that ends up working better. It’s a bit of a blessing that I can still go back and tweak things in that first book.

My goal for the next two weeks is to revise through the halfway point of The Huntsman. And get another 10k words down for The Wizard. My process seems to rely heavily on the back and forth from new material to revising the early stuff, so I’m going to see how well it works for the next two weeks.

Work while on Vacation

Laura Highcove

So I was able to smooth out a lot of The Huntsman in the week of May 3rd. Had to rejigger some things, but that’s just part of the process. I’m actually fairly happy with how things are turning out.

Had a little more trouble working on Tabitha’s character arc, as I spent the latter part of last week depressed and decided I needed to take care of myself rather than try and power through it. I was still able to create an outline of what I want Tabitha’s scenes to be, so now I simply need to write them, and I have to get that done before Emelia can step into place.

But I am on vacation this week so I’m only spending a bit of my morning actually working. This is a short update for that very reason, and though I’m behind, I’m not yet worried about not finishing on time. It’s a rough draft, so the important thing is just getting it all out.

My Holiday Break

Laura Highcove

I travel for holidays. I got all my files in dropbox, added tons of chargers, my DS packed some reading books, and, of course, clothing. Everything I wanted or needed. Got to my mother’s and realized I had left my netbook on my desk while it was syncing with Dropbox as I finished packing.

I was three hours from home with NO LAPTOP. Yeah, it’s probably a first for me.
I don’t really care about being unplugged from social media. No, my real concern was that I had planned to write the rough draft of my newsletter, this journal post, and get some revision done. Instead I had only the scrivener app on my phone (which is great, but I use it more for notes or quick things than sitting down and writing, and it’s not connecting to my regular dropbox anyway for reasons.)

Then my husband reminded me that I’m on vacation. That writing those things was akin to him checking his work email (which I give him hassle for). While the writing itself is not really work for me, writing blog posts and such is. So I decided to listen to his advice and actually take a vacation. As such there was no post last Monday.

In the future, I would like to get far better about being prepared for blog posts and the like ahead of time. (I could’ve done a cute little Merry Christmas post). I just find myself in the same rut of “Oh, I’ll write up the blog post and post it while I’m traveling.” And yeah, that doesn’t really work for me. I need to stop telling myself I will do it when I very obviously will not.

I did plenty of writing in the week before taking my holiday break. I’m still moving forward on Law of the Prince Charming revision (almost done now!) and re-writing the beginning of the Huntsman. Once I’m done with LotPC, I’ll be hammering a bit harder on the Huntsman. According to my own planning, I am waiting to see where I am with that story by the end of January. If I am *still* having trouble it might be time to consider some different options. After reviewing this last year I realized I’ve been struggling with the Huntsman for almost the whole year, and that just doesn’t work. One possibility is throwing it at people who have read the LofPC and getting suggestions/feedback on the rough draft that I do have. I dunno, I’ll see at the end of the month.

My holiday was tons of fun. Got to see my siblings, their significant others, and offspring as well as my parents. Since I don’t live nearby I generally only see them for these holidays though we keep in touch some through the wonder of the Internet. I got some good presents, I got to talk about my writing with a few different people. (That’s always nerve-wracking. :p) I also played a lot of Story of Seasons. And now we’re back to the grind, which really isn’t that bad. I missed writing.